Whyfore

Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..

Ten Million Dollar Idea?

I’m a big fan of X-Prize style innovation. Instead of hiring a research team, and building a whole facility to research a subject, just start adding to a prize fund for whoever the first person is to give you the answer you seek. This way, you end up getting facilities, minds, correlations, and other resources you may not have realized existed working for you, all without paying a cent until you see results.

Several years ago, Google started a project along these lines, asking the public for their ideas to change the world. They offered big connections and prize money to those ideas they chose as the best. They ended up far behind schedule, and I wasn’t that impressed with their choices in the end, but I like that they tried. My submission is below:

A data path exists for processing credit and debit transactions at stores. Use this system to upload store receipts to online accounts. The customer could then use their account at home (like online banking) to use this information as they see fit, and the aggregated data could be used to varying degrees (allowing for privacy) to better the retail system.

  • Like online banking or Amazon recommendations, it could be both secure and useful to all involved.
  • Allows people to track their own spending in an interactive fashion while saving manhours.
  • Potential for adsense like contextual marketing.
  • Could merge with personal finance software, calculate nutritional intake for dieters, alert people with allergies. etc.
  • Affects a large portion of the world (everywhere you want to be).
  • Employers can keep tabs on company credit card usage.
  • Checkboxes to make easy tallying and splitting of bills for roomates.
  • Reminders or suggestions for recurring purchases.
  • Easy to find one click tech support, manuals for bought products.
  • Competing stores could send advertising telling you how much you would have saved shopping with them.
  • Quicky target customers with product recalls. This could have prevented many deaths recently in China.
  • Could integrate with massive medical databases to find hidden correlations between products and health.
  • Manufacturers could target customers with coupons and offers.
  • Environmental: Saves paper on receipts, manuals, coupons, advertisements, as well as the other impacts from creation and delivery of such products.
  • Google is one of the very few companies with the resources, expertise, and trustworthiness to make this a reality. If you don’t do it, who will?

What problem or issue does your idea address?

  • Waste Management
  • Deforestation
  • Clutter
  • Wasted man-hours
  • Unnoticed product recalls
  • Compulsive spending
  • Allergic reactions
  • Credit Fraud
  • Running out of milk
  • Lost product manual/warranty
  • Advertising wasted on the uninterested
  • Medical research
  • Landfills

Involuntary Collaboration

Involuntary collaboration- Monsters in landscape paintings

Involuntary collaboration refers to a project contributed to by multiple parties in which at least one of those parties did not intend to be working with the others. Examples include things like covers of songs, spoofs of movies, and in the case of the pictures above (painted in part by Chris McMahon), unwanted landscape paintings bought at yard sales, which he then painted monsters into. I think they’re brilliant, and would be a perfect DIY project to hang in your kid’s room, or send to your grandmother.

A similar process (seen below from The Monster Engine), has adults upgrading children’s drawings of monsters to add realism. Sometimes the toughest thing for an artist can be just sitting in front of the canvas wondering what to paint, or going through all the trouble of painting a whole landscape when what they really want to paint is a big hairy monster, and it can be hard to throw away original artwork, even if it is boring.

Children's Drawing Collaboration

Update: It looks like more people have been picking up on this idea.

Dave Pollot and his thrift store paintings:

UFO stuck in the mud

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Involuntary Collaborations

Plastic Molding

plastic molding

Liquid plastic casting resins tend to be expensive and have set properties that limit your flexibility.  Mikey77 has come up with his own material out of materials so common, chances are you already have them. Best of all, you choose the color, viscosity, and set time yourself based on your needs.

He calls the stuff Oogoo, a name reminiscent of Sugru, an off the shelf product with very similar properties. In a nutshell, his recipe is very simple, just mix corn starch with silicone caulk.

The problem with silicone is that it takes a long time to dry from the outside in, the corn starch allows it to dry from the inside out, and very quickly. The ingredients are pretty safe and stable, so you can mix in your own dyes and other ingredients. Check out his full instructable here.

Recycled Pull-Tab

We live in a world full of uniform, mass produced, cheap little wonders. Case in point, the humble pull tab. Tossed out as refuge in the millions every day, but what better way to attach something on the wall? Just screw a pull tab to it and hang it over a screw/nail in the wall.

Yet another brilliant redneck repair brought to you by the folks at thereifixedit.

Billiard Bowling

Billiards bowling

“Knockers” is what Steve Wienecke calls his game. Somehow I don’t think that’s gonna stick, but the game just might. He’s scaled up a pool table enough to play it with bowling balls. I’d love to give this a shot. It looks like more fun than regular bowling. Just don’t try to build one of these in your garage unless you like holes in your walls.

(via neatorama)

Hologram Maker

Cityscape Hologram

ZebraImaging is by far the best hologram maker I’ve seen. Their ZScape™ holograms are huge, hi resolution, color, have a strong 3D effect, and are almost perfectly smooth in motion. These things compare to the bird on your credit card like an Etch-a-Sketch does to an I-Max. Check out the video below, it’s pretty stunning.

Zebra Imaging sells their pulse laser hologram printers, as well as selling and making hologram prints. Their pricing isn’t bad either, considering the quality and size. Most people could afford a print if they made it a priority in their life. Hopefully the price will come down further soon.

Liquid Antenna

Liquid Antenna

This antenna being developed by SPAWAR Systems uses a jet of seawater as its conductor. It can both recieve and transmit, and by adjusting the length of the jet, they can better tune in a specific wavelength.

Don’t expect to have one of these on your cellphone any time soon, but it seems like it would have a lot of potential for sensors floating out at sea.

Automatic Plant Waterer

Automatic plant waterer

The Groasis Waterboxx was the grand award winner in Popular Science’s 2010 top 100 innovations list. The base has a water reservoir which you fill once or very rarely. Any rainfall or morning dew runs down the top of the lid to water the plant, and the condensation from the reservoir collects on the underside of the lid and serves to water the plant in dry times.

At $275 for 10, it seems a bit pricey for it’s intended use in poor, arid nations, especially considering you could likely make a passable version of these out of old tires and trash can lids, but I see no reason it has to be an eyesore.  I can see a nicer version of this having use in parking lot plantings in semi-arid cities like Los Angeles, or for newly planted trees along highways.